Battle of Copenhagen (1807)

Battle of Copenhagen 1807
Part of the Gunboat War and the Napoleonic Wars
Copenhagen on fire, painted by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg
Date 16 August – 5 September 1807 Location Copenhagen 55°40′46″N 12°34′22″E / 55.67944°N 12.57278°E / 55.67944; 12.57278Coordinates: 55°40′46″N 12°34′22″E / 55.67944°N 12.57278°E / 55.67944; 12.57278 Result Decisive British victory. Danish navy surrendered to the United Kingdom.
Belligerents
United Kingdom	Denmark–Norway
Commanders and leaders
James Gambier Lord Cathcart	Ernst Peymann
Strength
25,000	10,000
Casualties and losses
42 killed, 145 wounded, 24 missing	3,000 soldiers, militia (All adults were militia during a siege), 195 children. Entire fleet surrendered to the British.

The Second Battle of Copenhagen (or the Bombardment of Copenhagen) (16 August – 5 September 1807) was a British bombardment of the Danish capital, Copenhagen in order to capture or destroy the Dano-Norwegian fleet, during the Napoleonic Wars. The incident led to the outbreak of the Anglo-Russian War of 1807, which ended with the Treaty of Orebro in 1812.

Britain's first response to Napoleon's Continental system was to launch a major naval attack on the weakest link in Napoleon's coalition, Denmark. Although ostensibly neutral, Denmark was under heavy French and Russian pressure to pledge its fleet to Napoleon. London could not take the chance of ignoring the Danish threat. In September 1807, the Royal Navy bombarded Copenhagen, seizing the Danish fleet, and assured use of the sea lanes in the North Sea and Baltic Sea for the British merchant fleet. A consequence of the attack was that Denmark did join the war on the side of France, but without a fleet it had little to offer.

The attack gave rise to the term to Copenhagenize.

Despite the defeat and loss of many ships in the first Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, Denmark-Norway, possessing Jutland, Norway, Greenland, Schleswig-Holstein, Iceland, and several smaller territories, still maintained a considerable navy. The majority of the Danish army, under the Crown Prince, was at this time defending the southern border against possible attack from the French.

There was concern in Britain that Napoleon might try to force Denmark to close the Baltic Sea to British ships, perhaps by marching French troops into Zealand. The British believed that access to the Baltic was "vitally important to Britain" for trade as well as a major source of necessary raw materials for building and maintaining warships, and that it gave the Royal Navy access to help Britain's allies Sweden and (before Tilsit) Russia against France. The British thought that after Prussia had been defeated in December 1806, Denmark's independence looked increasingly under threat from France. George Canning's predecessor as Foreign Secretary, Lord Howick, had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Denmark into a secret alliance with Britain and Sweden.

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